{{current_date_full}}

Good morning,

🎶 Friday Listening: A Flock of Seagulls - I Ran (So Far Away)

Last bit of housekeeping for the week: I will be out on vacation next week, taking my two passenger princesses on an old-fashioned road trip to see some of the natural beauty of this great country of ours. Jesus (the other one) will take the wheel here in my absence. Keep a look out for my interview with Rep. Jake Auchinchloss, dropping Monday around lunchtime. I really enjoyed this one, and I think this congressman is someone Democrats should start paying attention to. He gets it. 

We were talking the other day about data centers, and it got me thinking about another technological backlash we're seeing crest this summer. I'm talking about these Flock cameras, also known as Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs), that are popping up across the country. When we were out on Long Island last month, I noticed them on the side of the road for the first time. In fact, I saw one in the process of being installed, then saw it had been vandalized when I drove by the very next day. Right, left or center, Americans are in a bit of a Luddite mood right now. President Trump is uncharacteristically deaf to the bubbling voter backlash against Big Tech, mostly because he sees tech as an industry that makes him a lot of money, personally, so he doesn't care. But the backlash is legitimate — and it's growing. It's not just data centers, it's not just AI, and it's not just these ALPRs. I think it's this sense we all feel that we are losing our God-given autonomy and right to privacy in service of a new world that's making some people very, very rich, but which the broader societal benefits that keep being promised are still yet to materialize for most of us. 

ALPRs, or Flock cameras more specifically, are an interesting case study, because you could make a compelling argument this is one of the first examples of our new AI-powered panopticon actually working in service of the public. But you could also make a compelling argument in the opposite direction: that these cameras are the apotheosis of our Big Brother surveillance state that will, one day, be used against us.

Let's back up. There's about 120K of these Flock cameras currently in use across the US. The cameras automatically read license plates and feed that data back to local police, who can also use its nationwide, AI-powered database to search vehicles by descriptions. (ie. I'm looking for a black BMW, New York tags, plate starts with JNX...) Flock claims its database has been used to solve 700k crimes a year, which would be roughly 1 in 10 of all reported crime in the US. I find that hard to believe, but even if the company is inflating those numbers by an order of magnitude, this tech is still obviously useful in crime fighting. And you don't have to take the company's word for it. Cops have credited Flock hits with solving high profile crimes, like the shooting at Brown U. last year we covered here. Even low-profile crimes, like San Francisco's epidemic of "bipping" (car break-ins), have plummeted, in part, because of surveillance tech like ALPRs. 

The FBI recently made it official: last year saw the biggest nationwide drop in violent crime in 90 years. We are in the middle of an almost unheard-of collapse in crime just about everywhere, after living through that post-George Floyd spike when all the cops in America decided they were gonna go on a wildcat strike and stop doing their jobs to protest people being mean to them. In crime-ridden cities like Memphis, the precipitous drop has to do with getting back to the basics of policing, and local officials working hand-in-glove with the feds (check out my interview with the mayor of Memphis for more on this). In Baltimore, the drop is being credited to a new approach to community policing and early intervention. The WSJ had a cool story the other day about a renaissance taking place in Baltimore's housing market, where its once-stately rowhomes that had fallen into disrepair (made famous by The Wire) are now seeing bidding wars as the city gentrifies thanks, in large part, to the collapse in violent crime.

So how much of the drop-off in crime, from Memphis to B-More to Bip City itself, can we credit to Flock? We just don't know. It's still too early to say, but I think it's safe to assume a not-insignificant portion of the nationwide reduction can be attribution to new, AI-powered surveillance technologies like ALPRs. 

Then why are people so up in arms about this? Part of it has to do with these stories you hear about cops abusing the Flock database for their own purposes, like this officer who ran his estranged wife's plate 700 times. Or this story of a Florida woman who was locked up for two weeks because her SUV was incorrectly identified by the AI as causing a fatal accident. But if we're being serious, the blame on viral stories like that should really fall on the dirty and/or lazy cops who use the tool either poorly or for nefarious ends. And unfortunately there will always be dirty/lazy cops as long as cops exist, Flock or no Flock.

The bigger issue is what we talked about. Everyone can feel the surveillance state wherever they go now. I got a speeding ticket the other day because I was doing 40 in a 30 on a NYC “highway”. No reasonable police officer would light me up for going 10 over the speed limit, and even if he did, I'd be able to talk my way out of it. No such luck when it's a camera. We got a taste of this during Covid, but the panopticon is everywhere now. And that is what Americans, who are libertarians by nature, are reacting to. Combined with a general distrust of our tech overlords who claim AI will be used for good, and you're getting the closest thing we've had to a Boston Tea Party moment as people go around vandalizing and destroying these Flock cameras, as I saw with my own eyes this summer.  

And can you blame them? Back in April 2020, Kentucky said it would record the plates of anyone who broke lockdown to go to a "mass gathering" like church and feed that information to the health dept. which would then order those people to quarantine for 14 days. Now imagine that on a national scale during the next pandemic. Violate lockdown, and the Flock cameras will know immediately. Maybe they'll issue you an automatic ticket in the mail, like the one I just got, or maybe they'll dispatch federal law enforcement to your house. The issue is that we have all seen, recently and with our own eyes, how our government is capable of turning a noble pursuit (slowing the spread of a novel virus) into a form of overreach that violates our civil liberties en masse. So yeah, maybe Flock is helpful in solving some crimes today. But do you trust the combination of a private tech company working with the government to protect your rights down the line, when this tech is installed everywhere and not just on the sides of public roads?

There's a concept in our justice system known as Blackstone's ratio, which stipulates that it is better for multiple guilty people to go free than one innocent person to suffer a wrongful conviction. This principle is what makes our justice system unique, and precious. If you've ever served on a jury, you've felt the weight of it. You'd rather acquit a guilty defendant than convict an innocent person, which is why the standard to beat is "beyond a reasonable doubt." If you are even reasonably unsure this person committed the crime they are accused of, better to vote to acquit (this creates its own issue of jury nullification, of course, and the problem of people being too stupid to understand what counts as 'reasonable’ but that's a lesson for another day).

You can extrapolate Blackstone's ratio to the Flock debate. What is the trade-off between catching a criminal and violating, on a mass scale, our collective right to privacy? Do we even have such a right to privacy anymore? To have our information fed into the AI even when we're not doing anything wrong? And do you trust your government and a private tech company to make the right call in weighing that trade-off? I certainly do not.

Lots to digest there, but a good place to leave it. Enjoy the weekend and see y'all a week from Monday. Peace.

Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

Subscribe to the 1600 Podcast 🔔
YouTube
Apple
Spotify
iHeartRadio

By Alice Gibbs

The Ford-class aircraft carrier, designated CVN-81, was named after Doris "Dorie" Miller during Trump's first term in 2020, marking the first time a U.S. aircraft carrier would be named after an enlisted sailor and the first named after a Black American.

Now, Navy officials have discussed changing the vessel's name, with President Donald Trump reportedly among the names under consideration.

Melania Trump is back after a lengthy absence from the public eye. I was at her event, which was moved up because it was supposed to storm. Instead of rain, it ended up being extremely hot. But we managed since it was a brief event, and notably, President Trump didn’t end up participating. He was just there as a spectator, which made the event much shorter since he usually takes up a lot of time when he speaks.

Melania started her speech by cracking a joke about being away from the public eye for some time. She said, “Good afternoon, I heard you missed me. Here I am.”

She got a helmet as a gift from race car drivers who participated in the event, which focused on expanding support for her foster care initiative.

This was notable because the president did not receive a gift and he’s known to be a fan of them. He also wasn’t really acknowledged throughout the event, despite being there to watch.

I wonder if he was a little jealous that Melania got all the attention this time. Or maybe he enjoyed not being the center of attention for once.

Trump won 2024 on four promises: seal the border, avoid new wars, fix the economy, drain the swamp. Nineteen months in, he’s underwater on all four. Every single one, which is impressive consistency from a man who insists he only wins.

Net approval went from positive 11.6 points on day one to negative 19.6 now. Immigration is still his best issue, sitting at negative 11.2. The economy fell from positive 6 to negative 28.3. Cost of living alone is at negative 42.7, his worst number in the whole tracker. Groceries are up 4 to 5 percent and gas as much as 20 percent since he promised in Montana that prices would “come down fast.”

The war pledge aged the worst. He said he’d end Ukraine in 24 hours, then started an entirely new war in Iran instead, and his approval has tracked its ceasefire-collapse-ceasefire cycle ever since. 

Corruption is the oldest line in his act, going back to “drain the swamp” in 2016. Ipsos found the share of Americans naming corruption a top worry jumped 10 points in a year, the biggest 12-month jump of any of the 30 countries the firm tracks. Only 17 percent approved of how his administration handled the Epstein files. Disclosures showed he personally made over $2 billion in 2025.

None of this is a great place for Republicans to be standing 75 days out from the midterms.

The FBI and CIA’s fatal mistake—confusing Khalid al-Mihdhar, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and “Khallad”—allowed KSM to escape attention.

In this series, Newsweek maps the road to 9/11 as it happened 25 years ago, day by day.

"I think the jobs numbers are quite noisy… After the deportations that we've seen during President Donald Trump's administration, and the closing of the border, this unfettered migration, we don't need to produce as many jobs."

—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s answer to a weakening job market report.

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].